Endless Thread - The Vault

Episode Date: January 26, 2018

This week, Endless Thread goes underground and back in time -- into what just might be the most important vault in the world. What's inside that vault? A treasure that originates with a Russian scientist during World War II.

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Question A. Hit me. How are you at keeping secrets? The best. How are you? The worst. I mean, I think I'm pretty good if someone is like, I will kill you, do not tell. I'm an honorable guy when things get serious.

But generally speaking, I'm a sharer. You know that Seinfeld episode about secrets? The Vault? Yeah, yeah. I guess it's an idea maybe in a couple of episodes, like that one when Kramer tells Jerry a secret. I'll tell you, but you can't say anything to me. I'm not saying anything.

I'm putting it in the vault. I'm locking the vault. It's a vault. But then, like, a few minutes later, when Jerry's with Elaine... Open my vault? Open your vault. Once I open the vault, it ceases to be a vault. You have good joy.

And, of course, Jerry folds. I'm a Jerry. Better than a George. True. But even if I'm not the best at keeping secrets, you know what I am good at. What? I'm pretty good at telling whether a vault is any good or not, like a physical vault.

I'm a good judge at whether it can keep its contents safe. Like, I'm not a lock picker, but I think about security. Hmm. Are you a cat burglar, Ben? I'm a proud cat owner. Does that count? Sure. Well, today I learned that you are into vaults, which is good because today's story is about

both kinds. You got your metaphor. vault where you keep secrets. And then there's the real vault where you keep valuables. And that's why we should call this episode the vault. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. This is endless threat. A show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I am here with my producer, Amory Siebertson, and we are finding all kinds of stories. We're going to listen to Redditors tell their stories. We are going to wade into the comments. It's going to be great and weird and fun.

and hopefully enlightening? One does not simply walk into our show without saying how it's made. We are coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station, and we're making this show with little help from our friends at Reddit. Emery, we should say that this week's story came from the Today I Learned or TIL community, which is where people post stories, interesting facts, they stumble on in the course of their interneting. Yep, this story has actually been posted a few times by different Redditors,

but it's about people who aren't necessarily. redditors. Haga, Marie Haga. Do you think Marie Haga is a reditor, Ben? I don't know, but she definitely knows how to talk to interviewers. Do you want very short answers, medium answers? Marie Haga is a former Norwegian diplomat. She was a member of parliament in that country, former Minister of Energy.

Her current job is to manage one of the world's most important vaults, maybe the most important vault in the world. This vault is in Norway. not like normal attached to Sweden and Finland, Norway. It's in this archipelago called Svalbard, way up north in the Arctic Ocean. Like if you go north from Svalbard, you're going to hit the North Pole. The two main mammals that live on Svalbard are Arctic foxes and reindeer. Also about 2,500 humans.

It is super remote. The entrance to the vault itself is small but striking. It's like a man-made obelisk sticking out of a glacier on top of a mountain. Yes, the vault itself is inside a mountain. Let me take you on a little tour. All right, Marie. Lead us into this glacier mountain. You open these metal doors.

It's like something out of a science fiction novel. And you walk 130 meters into the mountains through a tunnel. The walls are covered in snow and ice. Heck, they look like they're made out of snow and ice. There's this big chamber. That I normally call the cathedral. It's painted white. It's a lot of ice crystals there.

In this big room, you see three doors. These doors lead into three vaults. Valtz within the vault. What's inside? The precious treasure that is stored on permafrosty reindeer-covered islands in the Arctic ocean by a bunch of Norwegians. Behind the iciest ocean, vault door at zero degrees Fahrenheit.

Boxes, boxes, boxes and boxes of seeds. Seeds. Inside of these metal envelopes, 500 seeds per envelope. The seeds are from all over the world, and I mean all over the world. Every country. It's part of something called the crop trust. The crop trust is like this massive backup for the planet's food crops. There's only one backup, and this is it.

And it's all thanks to a Russian guy with a crazy story. Don't worry that's coming. But right now, how about a list of seeds in the backup from Marie Haga, whose official title is Director of the Crop Trust? So we are concerned to safeguard the 3,000 varieties of coconuts or the 4.5,000 varieties of potatoes, the 35,000 varieties of corn, the 125,000 varieties of wheat,

or the 200,000 varieties of potatoes, is rice, just to mention some examples. There seems to be kind of a Noah's Ark aspect to this. That is actually a good description. It is kind of a Noah's Ark of seeds. And it is meant to be a backup if things go wrong around the world. And unfortunately, things do go wrong around the world occasionally. Once a decade, Spalbard's staff is supposed to take new citizens,

seeds into the vault. This is going to happen just a few weeks after this episode comes out on February 26th, 2018. Marie Haga and her team will disarm the vault's alarm systems, turn on the lights to the long tunnel into the mountain, unlock and creak open the vault's big doors, and put more seeds inside. Any country that wants to store seeds in the vault can do it for free. And Marie says in the vault, there is world peace. South Korea's seeds sit in. next to North Korea seeds. There are seeds from Iraq sitting in the frigid silence. Afghanistan, Syria.

Seeds from Ukraine sit next to seeds from Russia. It's almost like this is the one thing the whole world can get behind. Protecting our food supply in case of an emergency. Like a big emergency. This single backup, this planet's worth of crop diversity living in relative peace under a mountain, the spirit of this has its origins in World War II, a global existential crisis like no other.

Svalbard's story starts actually not too far away, in Russia. The guy you could call Svalbard Seed Vault's grandfather was a man named Nikolai Vavilov. I don't know what the crop trust, my organization, would have been without Vavilo. He really explained to the world back in the early 1900s how we globally are fully interdependent when it comes to crops.

The crazy part of Vavlov's story, though, is that this man, a giant in the world of crop genetics, was thrown in a Russian gulag for his scientific principles. And a bunch of his devoted co-workers had to fend off rats and starvation to protect his life's work. The richest seed supply the world had ever seen, hidden away, underground, in its own vault, in what is now the city of St. Petersburg. Back then, though, it had a different name, Leningrad. And Leningrad was under siege. Okay, you know how people say so-and-so wrote the book on X?

Well, agricultural ecologist, ethnobotanist, and Franciscan brother, Gary Nabhan, wrote the book on our Russian botanist, Nikolai Vavilov. Well, Vavilov was from a very well-educated family in Russia. I think every one of his siblings became a scientist as well. The book is called Where Our Food Comes From, retracing Nikolai Vavilov's quest to end famine. In the circle of life, Gare's book shows that this Russian botanist and geneticist story really begins in famine just like it ends.

He grew up in a period where Russia and Eastern Europe had suffered one famine after another due to inclement weather causing crop failures. These famines that he grew up with, how serious were they? They were of epic. proportions from the 1860s on. There were six major famines that killed over a half million people in Eastern Europe and Russia. And so he grew up in this melu. Tolstoy was writing about the... Vavilov's upbringing around these horrendous crop failures and famines leads him to learn a ton about plants and botany. And as he is doing his work as a botanist in the 1920s, he

starts to get into this idea that collecting the plants or the seeds, preserving and understanding crop diversity around the world might help fight off crop failures because he might be able to breed the plants and find certain strains that could resist bad weather and thus famine. There were people with their eyes on the same prize earlier on in history, Thomas Jefferson, for example, who collected seeds and brought back cuttings of plants to the Americas. But Vavilov was the first one who had the education in what we would call evolutionary biology, how plants adapt to different climates and conditions. He had sort of this humanitarian set of values that underscored the way he did science

in sort of a remarkable way. I mean, he really was a superstar up there with Charles Darwin and other people that we could mention. We'll have more on the Charles Darwin of plant genetics in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey.

Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully, Make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. So we've been talking about Nikolai Vavilov, who by many measures is one of the world's seminal plant geneticists,

but also a scientist who has a very pointed reason for his work. He doesn't want any Russian, really any human, to die again because of famine. Over time, this remarkable humanitarian way of doing science gains Vivalov a lot of followers. both in terms of the science and his altruism. And over his career, Vavilov does something that's pretty incredible. He and his team of scientists gather hundreds of thousands of different kinds of seeds from 64 countries. It takes over 100 different expeditions to do this. He's like Russia's Indiana Jones of seed collection.

And he is super charismatic. He's handsome. He's good at raising money. But he's not without his detractors. Everybody famous has some haters. and Vavilov's got a problem. That problem's name is Trofim Lisenko. Lisenko starts out as a student of Vavlov, and Vivalov encourages him.

But then Lysenko gets into this weird pseudoscience that rejects the idea of genetics. And he becomes this like anti-science-based agriculture guy, which is little odd because he also becomes the head of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko doesn't like Vavlov. They are rivals now. and Lisenko gains the ear and the favor of Stalin. It's August of 1940. You can almost guess what happens next.

Valveloff was out on another collecting expedition in the Caucasus, found what he believed was a new subspecies of wild wheat that could be very effective because it was so drought-tolerant. And as he was coming back to his vehicle, several black unmarked cars from the KGB or its predecessor showed up and without talking to any of the other dozen scientists on the expedition

Vavilov was scuttled away and disappeared from public sight. So Vavilov is thrown into a prison in Leningrad, aka St. Petersburg. His family doesn't know where he is, his colleagues don't know where he is, but they have a mission, Bavlov's mission, of preserving and studying the world's food crops,

of killing off hunger forever. His mission has a headquarters. It's this building at 44 Herson Street in St. Petersburg. His staff sort of came together. They adored this man and said, we can't let anything happen to this collection. We don't know what's going to happen. And so they put three to five of their staffers on duty,

24 hours a day and sealed off 18 rooms because there was another threat about to hit St. Petersburg. The siege of Leningrad starts in 1941, a year after Vavlov disappears into a gulag. This prison is a stone's throw from his family home. Vavlov's family members pass by without even knowing he is right there in prison. The siege of Leningrad is unique in that it lasts almost the entire war, nearly 900 days. The city is cut off on the north by the Finnish Army and the south by the Germans. And at the time, it is one of the most destructive attacks on a major city in known history. Constant bombing.

Lack of food and water. People actually rush into the craters after bombs drop because water gathers in the craters. That's how they get their water. And through all of this, people are starving to death in Leningrad. Everyone, Russian soldiers, government officials, also, the families of the scientists who are protecting, secretly protecting, this massive seed bank. They are putting the location of the bank and the fact that it is full of food, seeds, rice, legumes in the metaphorical vault. They are not telling anyone. And they are really

freaking out, by the way, because Hitler is rumored to be really focused on capturing the seeds in this seed bank as part of his world domination efforts. So it really is a high-stakes mission. So think of it. You're starving to death. Your family is you opt for staying in this very powerfully positioned, well-guarded building, and your weight is going down. Your immune system is going down. And as one of the curators said, when someone asked him, was it hard for all of you to try to keep defending the seeds when you could have eaten them to improve your own personal health. He said, well, it was hard to wake up in the morning. It was hard to get on our feet because we were so weak. It was hard to get our clothes on because it was cold, but it was not hard to

protect those seeds. Tell me the story about the P collection curator. Alexander Skukin, took care of peas, peanuts, and other legumes. And he was one of the ones who died in the first year of the effects of starvation with his seed envelopes in his hand. We know that other people died of diseases carried by rats that they were trying to evict from eating the seeds. a rice collector named Dmitri Ivanov. He died within just a few feet of a thousand packets of rice

that just by boiling up water, cooking the rice could have saved his life. Overall, 12 scientists died protecting Bavlov's life's work during the siege of Leningrad, most of starvation. As for Vavilov, after a year and a half of eating frozen cabbage and moldy flour, he also died of starvation. He never made it out of the gulag. But the seeds survived, and so did the mission. The Spalbard Seed Vault in Norway is a direct descendant of Vavilov's work.

And that building in St. Petersburg is now the Vavlov Institute of Plant Industry. You visited the seed vault in St. Petersburg a few years back. What was that like for you? In my years of doing science, I've only... wept twice. And once was in Hawaii when I saw 15 different endangered species, the last individual

of many of those species, all sitting on one table in a nursery and there were none of those species left in the wild. I felt the same way when I saw the wall of photos of those 12 scientists, Russian scientists, who gave up their lives to save those seeds. I was brokenhearted.

What did you see in their faces? The best that any of us can hope to be on behalf of our fellow creatures. Thanks so much for talking with us. Thank you. Bless you for your good work. Back to Norway in a minute. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice.

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Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. So, Amory, let's go back to Marie Haga for a minute, whose team of scientists are about to open the Svalbard seed vault doors on a frozen island in the Arctic Ocean. Yeah, so here's a question, Ben. If these countries store the seeds there for free, who's paying that Svalbard electric bill? Like, who pays for the seed vault to exist? Great question. I asked Marie this. Our organization is first and foremost funded by governments.

But increasingly, the Crop Trust is trying to work with the private. sector. And Marie gave me an example. We have just developed a conservation strategy for coffee. Coffee happens to be very climate sensitive. And that is why we think that the major coffee companies over the world should get involved in our work and also contribute to funding it. I, for one, am very glad that the organization trying to protect the world's food crops from a doomsday scenario is also working on keeping coffee around.

Yeah, I think we're going to need coffee after the apocalypse. But for Marie, of course, it's bigger than coffee. You know, I consider it a great privilege to work on something so fundamentally important as safeguarding the diversity of crops. That job is really about safeguarding the basis for our food now and tomorrow and forever. Amory, do you think it's possible to ever keep something in the vault forever?

Are we talking secrets or seeds? Or seed crits? Oh, my dad would be proud of that one. Mine too. But no, no, I don't think so. Really? Yeah, really. I mean, I kind of hate to say it, but I think sooner or later we're going to need to need.

those seeds in Svalbard because of climate change. And I think a secret that's keeping you down, it's got to come out of the vault. And speaking of bringing things out of the vault, shout out to Abigiligalegal for posting about the Russian scientists who protected Vavilov's seed vault. If you want to see pictures of Svalbard and more from this story, you can head to wbUR.org slash endless thread. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. The idea for the show was conceived by Jessica Alpert, who, when we ask if she likes the episode we've put together, she always says... No, no, no, no, no. Yes!

Iris Adler is our executive producer and human proof that we are... Totally not robots. Mix and sound design by John Parati and Paul Vikas, who liked to make the show sound... Interesting. Our web producer is Megan Kelly, who looks at our attempts at writing web copy and goes, Aw. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and whenever we have our weekly meeting with him, we can all agree. It was oddly satisfying.

Our theme music is by Squelcher. This week's episode, Artwork, came from Reddit user Milk's Perfect, aka Andy Carter. It's called Doorway. Andy, thanks a lot. Redditors, if you want to make art for an upcoming episode, hit us up at Endless Thread at WBUR. Find us on Twitter at Endless underscore Thread. If you want to reach out to us about a story or give us feedback on the show, you can find us on Reddit as well. Our username is Endless Underscore Thread.

We are also online at WBUR.org slash Endless Thread. You can subscribe to the show on your podcast app of choice. And if you love the show, write us a review. It helps other people find us. Today, you learned the show is produced by Amory Sieverts. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.